Thinky drops Inkling: 975B-param, 41B-active multimodal open model, now the top US Apache 2.0 base

[AINews] Thinky's Inkling: 975B-A41B multimodal, new best American Apache 2.0 open model (with Inkling-Small, 276B-A12B)

Thinky released Inkling, a 975B-total, 41B-active MoE model that handles text, image, audio, and video with a 1M-token context window. Trained on 45T tokens and licensed Apache 2.0, it landed with day-0 support from vLLM, Hugging Face, and others. The team frames it as a customizable base for future iterations, not a benchmark-chasing flagship. A 12B-active Inkling-Small preview also dropped. Independent reviewers call it the strongest US open-weight model so far, though it still trails top Chinese open and best closed models on some benchmarks.

Why it matters: Thinky's first full model launch — 975B MoE, Apache 2.0, fills a gap in the US open-source landscape. Mira Murati's team pedigree, 1M context, and native multimodal hit all three HKR axes. Held back from 90+ because we only have benchmark numbers and the team's own claims so f...